One Barrel: Down to the stems

In the afternoon, we finally clear ourselves to begin work on the SunHawk blend. But before we do, there’s the lingering question of bunch stems: Do we use them, and if so, how much?

I realize that Kevin has been distracted all morning not only from an acute midharvest lack of sleep but also because he’s mulling over this decision. I also realize that this decision is one that will guide the quality and essence of this wine for the next year or two. We can stare at stems and chew fruit all we like, but there’s a fundamental question at work: Do we take the safe road, make a Syrah-based wine that harnesses all the fruit’s ripeness but not the potential extra lift and finesse from the stems? Or do we roll the dice on this vineyard and these clusters of fruit, hoping that they are pristine enough and will bring us the extra nuance we want without the hard tannins that will chase away many wine drinkers?

This is not a new debate, but it is a fierce one, in California and elsewhere. No sooner did the last post go up than I got a bunch of e-mails/tweets/etc. hoping for whole cluster, and a few incredulous responses, like this one from a winemaking instructor: “I would NEVER recommend leaving the stems on and allowing it to ferment with the wine.”

As it turns out, Kevin — who interned in Burgundy — may believe in the traditional means of whole-cluster winemaking but has some relatively unorthodox thoughts about the process. For one, he believes that the conventional wisdom that stems must be brown and lignified to be ripe enough to use is just wrong. Many of his Pinots and Syrah have been made with what California vintners would call green, unripe stems. He has seen enough use of these green stems in the Old World to feel comfortable with his decision. And he’s not alone.

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Examining a cluster

So when I’d thrown out numbers earlier in the truck about how much whole cluster to use, Kevin’s response was more radical: 100 percent. Every grape cluster that makes it through the sorting table. This isn’t just an outré decision for the sake of being edgy. The traditional means of winemaking would be to use every whole cluster that was picked. Since our goal is to take a natural, minimalist approach, an all-whole-cluster wine is the logical (if risky) choice. And because we’re going to ferment the wine using a lot of whole berries, a version of the semi-carbonic maceration found in Beaujolais, we’ll need a lot of whole berries (and not those partially pulped by an imperfect destemmer) to make it work.

Of course, this is a dialogue. He wants to give me the chance to make the decision rather than step in with his winemaker expertise. (Plus, if the wine’s too green, he can always share the blame with the foolish newbie.) So we head back into the depths of the winery and pull two samples.

One is from a barrel of Heintz Ranch Syrah for Kevin’s Salinia label that was made with destemmed grapes. The other is the same lot of fruit, but made with whole clusters. The more standard wine is certainly bright and supple, but the whole-cluster batch is a different animal: floral and heady with saline aromas, a wine whose complexity is immediate. It admittedly has a bit more structural punch on the palate, and more evident tannins, but the aromatics are more layered and profound, and the tannins fine, giving the wine an eloquent mien.

Since I’m not particularly afraid of tannin in my wine (and I don’t have to sell it to appease a common-denominator palate) and the aromatics speak for themselves, it’s an easy decision.

“Let’s go for it,” I say. Kevin grins. Yeah, he knew.

Now we can begin. We finally get the SunHawk fruit on the sorting table. Kevin’s instructions are simple enough: If you wouldn’t eat it, throw it out.

Mostly we’re on the lookout for bee damage, grapes that have been punctured or lost their juice. Because we’re doing the whole thing whole-cluster; the fruit must be in nearly perfect shape. Too much damage and we invite microbial disaster or harsh tannins from crushed stems. So we’re a bit relentless on the table — me, Kevin, his assistant winemaker David Philo, Dave’s brother Scott, and two harvest interns, Louisa (aka “Lefty”) and Marissa (aka “Pumpkin”).

It is about this point that the day’s soundtrack, heavy on the Beastie Boys, finally pushes Dave too far. (To his credit, I’d say that no matter what great images Spike Jonze left in our heads, “Sabotage” should not be heard six times in a day.) We switch to Stereolab.

We have a total of six half-tons bins of fruit, not all filled up. That includes 3,400 pounds of Syrah (enough for 85 percent of the blend); about 300 lbs. of Grenache (about 7 percent) and another 8 percent of the rest. So there’s a lot of Syrah to get through, and a lot of punctured berries, plus small leaves, insects and what the wine industry loves to refer to as MOG (material other than grapes) to discard. The Syrah is tiny and intense; the Grenache more fruity but with a tannic punch in the skins that hints at its likely disposition less as a happy strawberry-fruited thing than a brooding, serious sibling to Chateauneuf or Calatayud.

Jon Bonne/The Chronicle

Grape patrol: Kevin, me, Marissa, Scott.

It’s the last bin that brings us the white grapes — a bit of Roussanne and Marsanne, plus some big-berried Cinsault that would look more at home in a tabletop cornucopia. (There’s a reason Cinsault typically winds up being made into rosé; lotta juice in them berries.)

At last, the sorting is done and it’s time to get the fruit into the fermenter. We’re using a two-ton open-top steel fermenter, fitted to be used with a cooling system, but in this case it will be free-standing on the winery floor, left to ferment at its own rate and temperature.